Archinect - News

Reviving Main Street, but now it's highbrow

2019-02-21T13:38:00-05:00

Wealthy individuals like Mr. Resnick, well-funded nonprofits and even corporations...have begun buying deserted American main streets, hoping to reinvent them with a fresh aesthetic. The people behind these ventures frequently install their friends and acquaintances in storefronts, while attempting to preserve (or exploit, depending whom you ask) local history. The practice is rarely free of conflict, even when developers have the best intentions.

In Mountain Dale NY, Butch Resnick now owns most of the previously vacant buildings and has hired a "town curator". Jennifer Miller digs into this and other recent examples, including in Monson Maine, Wardensville, W.Va, Cerro Gordo CA, of combining artists, rural-small-town nostalgia and tastemaking to create the perfect blend of artisanal, hipster consumerism scaled down from the lifestyle center to the town.

These architects actually proposed building the border wall with shipping containers and micro-housing units

2017-03-09T12:35:00-05:00

What if the border wall proposed by Trump didn’t have to be built in concrete, but rather out of that ubiquitous staple of BArch theses and “pop-up” urbanism, shipping containers? That’s the twee take of DOMO Design Studio, who propose a “softer, gentler” version of the wall, wherein shipping containers line the US/Mexico border. And, if that wasn’t enough, the shipping containers will include other tropes of contemporary urbanism, from retail spaces to micro housing.

Yep, that’s right: DOMO Design Studio imagines you might want to live in a tiny home within a piece of divisive infrastructure! It’s the Bushwick of xenophobic nationalism: a dystopia of hipster consumerism set within an aestheticized landscape populated by the signifiers of the post-industrial economy!

“One of our goals was to not be like the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall or any of those typologies that represent division,” principal architect Francisco Llado told Politico. “Our design is not about division bu...

Why do all hipsters look the SAME?

2015-03-23T14:22:00-04:00

There is always a delay between the time a trend begins to gain traction, and the time hipsters begin following it. This delay is caused because people can't be aware of what others are deciding, in real-time. As a result, hipsters gradually realise that the trend, and the decision has been made while making the same decision separately. This leads to them gradually conforming towards what then becomes the mainstream.

Now, try to imagine "architects" instead of "hipster." Vertical farms? Poche? Blobs? Hedonistic urbanism? Parametric buildings? New Urbanism? Old Urbanism? Etc, etc,.

Seven Myths About New Urbanism

2014-09-24T15:21:00-04:00

Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University and an untiring defender of the suburbs, begins a recent column in the Washington Post with a valid question: “What is a city for?” He then proceeds to get that question completely wrong. But really, we should be thanking him. In his article, he neatly sums up many of the key myths emerging from the anti-urbanism set, making my job of debunking these myths a lot easier.

The aforementioned WP column already managed to spark a lively discussion last month here on Archinect.

The people designing your cities don’t care what you want. They’re planning for hipsters.

2014-08-15T13:45:00-04:00

current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. [...] Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.

Surveying the top cities to “flip to hipsters”

2014-02-12T10:04:00-05:00

The low hipster homeownership rate of the past five years translates into a market of potentially millions of first-time homebuyers looking to find a home that matches their budget and fits into their hipster lifestyle. Real estate investors who want to tap into that trend should start with location: finding homes in communities with a heavy hipster demographic, and that are affordable for that demographic.

Daren Blomquist, RealtyTrac Vice President examines the top 20 zipcodes for flipping homes to hipsters.

h/t AlJavieera Sueños

Creating the Post-Hipster City

2012-05-22T22:23:00-04:00

we want to experiment in making better public spaces. Cities are built in a very formal and classist fashion, which is at odds with the good that rapid production and public participation can do for urban development.

Tidda Tippapart recently talked to Aurash Khawarzad ( founder of Change Administration + co-founder of the Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary collective DoTank) about the challenge of creating the post-Hipster city, gentrification, and what it means to (re)build New York City from the ground up.